Rod Dreher

How To Tell If Your Baby Is Trans

That is Diane Ehrensaft, one of the nation’s top pediatric gender specialists, advising a medical conference on how to tell if one’s baby is transgender.

I found that clip via the must-read website 4th Wave Now, a community of people — often parents of supposedly trans kids — who are skeptical of transgender ideology. 4th Wave Now is not religious or politically partisan. I strongly urge you to spend some time there. It will make you think hard about how this incredibly destructive ideology is being marketed in the medical establishment, and in (and by) the mass media.

I’m reading now Ryan T. Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally, which is a great primer on the transgender phenomenon for the lay reader. It may shock you to discover in detail the degree to which the “science” of transgenderism is driven not by science, but by cultural politics. I mean, you probably suspected it, but to get into the weeds, as Anderson does, is to be hip deep in true madness.

Professor of social work, Dr. William Brennan, has written that “[t]he power of language to color one’s view of reality is profound.” It is for this reason that linguistic engineering always precedes social engineering — even in medicine. Many hold the mistaken belief that gender once meant biological sex. Though the terms are often used interchangeably they were never truly synonymous. Feminists of the late 1960’s and 1970’s used gender to refer to a “social sex” that could differ from one’s “biological sex” in order to overcome unjust discrimination against women rooted in sex stereotypes. These feminists are largely responsible for mainstreaming the use of the word gender in place of sex. More recently, in an attempt to eliminate heteronormativity, queer theorists have expanded gender into an excess of 50 categories by merging the concept of a social sex with sexual attractions.9 However, neither usage reflects the original meaning of the term.

Prior to the 1950s, gender applied only to grammar not to persons. Latin based languages categorize nouns and their modifiers as masculine or feminine and for this reason are still referred to as having a gender. This changed during the 1950s and 1960s as sexologists realized that their sex reassignment agenda could not be sufficiently defended using the words sex and transsexual. From a purely scientific standpoint, human beings possess a biologically determined sex and innate sex differences. No sexologist could actually change a person’s genes through hormones and surgery. Sex change is objectively impossible. Their solution was to hijack the word gender and infuse it with a new meaning that applied to persons. John Money, PhD was among the most prominent of these sexologists who redefined gender to mean ‘the social performance indicative of an internal sexed identity. In essence, these sexologists invented the ideological foundation necessary to justify their treatment of transsexualism with sex reassignment surgery and called it gender. It is this man-made ideology of an ‘internal sexed identity’ that now dominates mainstream medicine, psychiatry and academia. This linguistic history makes it clear that gender is not and never has been a biological or scientific entity. Rather, gender is a socially and politically constructed concept.

You absolutely cannot trust the media on this issue.

Reader, you might think that this is a fringe phenomenon that has nothing to do with you. You are wrong. In Ontario, where pro-trans legislation has been passing swiftly, the state has the right to seize children from families that do not support the child’s wish to live as transgendered.

You will not hear politicians here talking about this. They are afraid to — afraid of being tarred in the media as bigots. But it’s happening. Read 4th Wave Now to see what parents across the ideological spectrum are dealing with.